Alas, yet another sign that yet another era is ending. The New York Times is reporting that after 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print. While it's easy to imagine that we'll survive just fine without it—in this age of Wiki everything—we also know that life will never be the same. Now knowledge-starved children will be tasked with googling something to learn about it rather than turning to those beautiful, if obscenely heavy, bound volumes. (That gold lettering! The randomness of topics allowed by alphabetical entries!) Nevertheless, all is not lost. We will still have online access to the rock solid information once contained in the encyclopedias. Though until they find a way to recreate the experience of holding the weighty tome in one's hand and inhaling the almost ancient smell of the Encyclopaedia Britannica through your electronic device, we can still rightly sulk about the death of these classic books.